Mehlman Accepts the Challenge

The Republican faithful always complain that Republican leaders have no spine, that they cave
before egregious Democratic attacks and run for cover. But it looks as though the GOP is ready
for a rumble on the Karl Rove flap, in which Democrats everywhere are expressing outrage at
Karl Rove when he said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9-11 and the attacks and prepared for war;
liberals saw the savagery of the 9-11 attacks and wanted to
prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

Says
Ken Mehlman on the Democratic reaction:

It’s outrageous that the same Democrats who stood by Dick Durbin’s libeling of our
military are now expressing faux outrage over Karl Rove’s statement of historical fact.
George Soros, Michael Moore, MoveOn and the hard left were wrong after 9/11, just as it
was wrong for Democrat leaders to stand by
and remain silent after Dick Durbin made his deplorable comments.

And then he backs it up with pages of quotes from liberals and Democratic angel George Soros recommending
a restrained therapeutic response to the 9/11 attacks.

What would the Democratic Party be like if its activists were all falling over each other to recommend
a therapeutic response to the rise of the dreaded religious right?

Did the Profs Cry Uncle?

All of a sudden, according to
David Horowitz, it seems that the academic establishment has called for a peace
process in the academic freedom wars. For the last couple of years Horowitz has been campaigning for
universities to adopt his Academic Bill of Rights, a manifesto
“that would foster intellectual diversity, fairness and equity in higher education.”
For his pains, Horowitz has been “compared to McCarthyites, Maoists, and Orwellian thought police by some of [his] overheated opponents.”
But now

The American Council on Education and a coalition of 22 college and university
associations, including the American Association of University Professors (who had declared our
bill a “grave threat to academic freedom”) have issued a statement that endorses the central
principles of our bill
and represents a great step forward in the academic freedom struggle.

Is it real, or is it Memorex? Only time will tell, of course. But the safest thing to do is follow
the money. Universities are non-profit entities that collect money from students, foundations, corporations,
alumni, and government and then spend it. The ideal situation for a university administration is for
happy contributors to give money without strings attached so that the university can spend the money
as it thinks fit. Of course, this ideal situation never obtains. The university is always under
pressure from a variety of special interests that each applies pressure to the university to spend money in a way
that benefits the interest. The job of the university administrator is to judge where the
sweet spot lies that will maximize contributions with the minimum of pain. But the bottom line is:
he or she will do whatever it takes to keep the money flowing.

Beware of Close Relationships

Marriage is a problem. On that we can all agree. And so a number of people have decided to do something about it. Let’s replace family law with “close-relationship” law, they say.

Suzanne Fields gives us a little intro to the close-relationship movement and a report about changing ideas on marriage in the academy.

Influential advocates from politically correct academic and legal organizations sneer at traditional marriage as another bad example of “ethnocentric” thinking that promotes “old-fashioned ideological stereotypes.” These advocates accuse the law of dismissing “diversity.” By diversity they mean the experience of racial minorities, women, single parents, divorced and remarried persons, gays, and lesbians. A large body of social science and psychological data demonstrate that not all forms of parenthood are equally child-friendly, but these advocates say that’s merely a point of view to be replaced by “close relationship” law.

It becomes harder and harder to parody the thinking coming out of our universities. But maybe the challenge to marriage is a good thing. It’s good for us to fight for our beliefs; it helps us understand who we are and what is important. As a well-known American once said: “Bring it on.

French-bashing on Sartre's Centenary

Conservative philosopher
Roger Scruton
does a retrospective on Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frenchman who tried to
find a meaning for life after God is Dead. It’s a problem.

For the religious world-view, self-consciousness is a
source of joy, proof of our apartness from nature, of our special
relation to God and of our ultimate redemption, as we leap from the
world into the arms of our creator. For Sartre, self-consciousness
is a kind of all-dominating nothingness, a source of anxiety:
proof of our apartness, certainly, but also of our loneliness,
which is a loneliness without redemption, since all the doors
on our inner walls have been painted
there by ourselves and none of them will open.

Since Sartre, of course, the entire French elite and latterly their epigones in the American
academy have lived by banging into the doors on their inner walls. That
is fine. Let them wreck their lives if they want to.
The trouble
is that Sartre ended up wrecking France.

The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps
never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual
establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that
hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France.
The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank intellectual has entered
the political process, and given rise to an elite for whom nothing
is certain save the repudiation of the national idea.

Read the whole thing.

What's The Point?

News reports indicate that House Republicans are drafting a Social Security bill
that
strips out personal accounts. If that is true, then
what’s the point of it? There is no point in doing anything with Social Security unless
we start the process of sucking money out of the government’s coffers and into individual
Americans’ pockets. The current Social Security surplus just allows the
federal government to spend money on Democrats and buy their votes. Then, in ten years, the
idea is to raise taxes
on Republicans to pay Social Security to aging liberals who have done nothing except
show up for work for the last 30 years.

Anything short
of personal accounts just keeps shoveling money at Democratic voters with no end in
sight.

Tell me that I’m missing something here.

Cheer Up Chaps!

Ever since the election, conservatives have been down in the dumps.
Cheer up, conservatives, write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, British authors
of The Right Nation, you chaps are still winning. After the orgasm of November, of course
you are going to feel sad.

The bottom line is that conservatives are the optimists in America.
They write:

the Republicans are more optimistic, convinced that the future
will be better than the past and that they can determine their own futures. Democrats,
on the other hand, have a European belief that “fate,” or, in
modern parlance, social circumstances, determines people’s lot in life.

On top of that, Bush won in the places where people are having children. Kerry won in the
cities where people are not. The fact is that liberals just aren’t having children.
Studies show, after all, that the people most satisfied with their sex
life is... well who do you think?

Right first time: married conservative women. Who would have thought that back in the Sixties?

Victim of the Welfare State

For over a century progressives have dined out on the misery of the poor. It was
all the fault of capitalism, they said. It was the inevitable consequence of
an uncaring society blinded by a mean-spirited ideology to the sufferings of the poor and
the unfortunate, the helpless
victims of ruthless capitalism. But after a century of the welfare state,
we are seeing another kind of victim, people victimized by the culture and the ethos
of the rule of the experts.
Minette Marrin
tells the story of one such victim, memorialized in Stuart: a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters.
It’s a story of abuse and incest, and step-parenting. Of course.